


After Disaster

by apollos



Category: South Park
Genre: Depression, Hospitals, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Suicide, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3508598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Comes the rebuilding. The weeks in Kyle's life after Stan tries to kill himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After Disaster

When Kyle had thought about it—and he thought about it quite a lot—he had expected the call to come at three in the morning and wake him up. He had expected to drive like a madman to the emergency room in his pajamas. He had expected to sob at a bedside and hug Stan around his neck and tell him that he loved him, he loved him so much—

None of that happened, though. There was a call, but it came when Kyle was writing an essay on the couch, vaguely pissed off at Ike for making too much noise while he was trying to concentrate. He wasn't even the one to get the call, it was his mother, because none of the Marshes had his phone number besides Stan himself and pulling it out of his phone was probably the last thing they were thinking about. So Kyle was on the couch, one leg hanging off, his laptop burning his lower stomach, when his mom came into the living room with her face ashen and the landline in her hand.

"Kyle," she said, softly. It was her bad news voice, her  _your grandmother passed away last night_  voice, and Kyle's hands paused in the middle of a sentence about the Korean war. "Stan's in the hospital."

"Why?" Dread pooled in his stomach; in combination with the heat from his laptop, it made him feel sick. He shut his laptop and placed it on the floor, sat up. Knotted his fingers in his hair and looked at the ugly upholstery of the couch that had been here since childhood.

"He—" Sheila's voice broke and Kyle could hear her mass moving at him at an impossible speed. Fleshy arms wrapped around his stick of a body, squeezed him, and Kyle kept his fingers in his hair. "He tried to kill himself."

Sheila was sobbing into his hair. Kyle was quiet.

It was a Thursday; Kyle had been thinking about his weekend plans and writing an essay that was due tomorrow that he'd uncharacteristically put off, sick with worry for this very thing. It was a Thursday, a Thursday in spring that was sunny and bright. It was a Thursday and it was the final stretch of their—because Kyle had thought of him and Stan as a unit for a long time, possibly forever—senior year. It was a Thursday and Kyle was wearing jeans and a polo as he drove to Hell's Pass, songs playing softly on the radio is a hum that he could not make out.

The emergency room had just one person in it, a man that seemed to be homeless tucked away in a corner and dozing. Kyle took his sunglasses off, hung them in his pocket, and approached the desk. A plain nurse—she looked like Sharon Marsh, or maybe Sharon Marsh looked like all the other plain nurses in the world—was behind the desk.

"I'm here to see Stan Marsh," Kyle said. He was carding his fingers through his hair.

"Room 3," the nurse said, reading off a clipboard. Then, because this was a small town, she looked up at Kyle with a stricken, sad look on her face. But having gained all the information he needed, Kyle walked away from the desk and through the door to the rooms.

He did not enter Room 3 immediately. He stood outside it, angled so they couldn't see the vague impression of him visible through the distorted glass window from inside the room, and stared down the empty, lowly-lit linoleum hallway. Everything was in weird, muted shades that reminded Kyle of vomit; all the preparation in the world could not had made this situation any better. After a few minutes, he mustered up the courage and entered the door.

It was crowded in the little room. Stan was in bed, his eyes closed, though he did not seem to be sleeping. Randy was in a chair and watching the television, turned to a crude level in volume. Sharon was sitting on the bed, one of Stan's hands in hers. The only immediate family member absent was Shelley, away at college. There was no immediate reaction to Kyle, so he cleared his throat to attract attention.

"Oh, Kyle." Sharon spoke to him in the same tone of voice that his mother had. "Stan, Kyle and I are going to step outside for a second, okay?" Stan gave no response; Sharon pressed a kiss to his pallid forehead.

Back in the hallway, Sharon seemed to deflate. Her shoulders slumped; her head hung; her fingers suspended in the air. Kyle, uncomfortable, continued looking down the hallway, thought about the essay he'd been interrupted in writing. Would his teacher be understanding? Why was he thinking about this right now? His boyfriend had—

"He took a bottle of pills," Sharon said to the floor, "with some Jack Daniels. Randy found him and we called 911—they said he'd taken too many so in combination with the alcohol—he had to have his stomach pumped—" She had started shaking.

Kyle leaned against the wall of the hallway, the little bumps in the texture of the paint digging into him like several small stabs from a letter opener. "Jesus," he said. He felt very young, suddenly. Very small and very young in this vast hospital hallway. Too small young for any of this.

"We think he'll have to go to—the other hospital." Kyle understood what she meant; the mental hospital. The psychiatric hospital. The other hospital. The nearest one was two hours away.

"Jesus," he repeated.

Kyle went back in with Sharon, but Stan was catatonic and Randy was suffocating and Sharon was depressing, so ultimately he just went home. There was this nagging pull of guilt in his gut—once more, that did not match up with what he had always imagined—but there was also nothing he could do. It wasn't even getting dark by the time he returned, and what hours ago had been a whirlwind now felt like a gentle breeze of emotion.

The essay did not get done. Instead, his mother pulled him aside and they went to his parents' room, his dad still at work and Ike preoccupying himself with video games. Being in his parents' room had always made Kyle feel nostalgic, and today it was so overwhelming it pulled his body down into the bed. His parents had such a nice, big bed, where Kyle used to retreat to when he had nightmares, where Kyle was forced to retreat now.

"It's not your fault, you know, bubbleh," his mother said. She sat beside him, not touching him. "He has been very sick for a very long time."

"I know that," Kyle spat.

"No need to get snappy." She rubbed his leg. There was no animosity in her voice. "Do you want to take off school tomorrow?"

"No," Kyle snapped.

He craned his neck up to see his mother struggling; she probably wanted to collect gossip on Stan but had problem with the ethics. The conversation did not move past that point and Kyle ended up falling asleep there in that bed that smelled of his mother, wrapped in his father's blanket, right in the middle. He was only eighteen, he told himself over and over, he was only eighteen, and he lost track of whether he was saying it in regards to himself or Stan as he faded into sleep.

He woke up when it was dark outside; a look at the alarm clock on the bedside table told him it was just past eight. He felt infinitely more tired than he had before he went to sleep but also like he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep and so he pulled himself out of bed. He shuffled down the stairs rubbing at his eyes and scratching at his stomach and had a flashback of doing the same thing but with a blanket in his hands, ten years ago. He wished he would stop remembering his childhood.

Dinner was a painful and tedious affair. Either his mother's quality of cooking had taken an unfortunate downturn or Kyle had lost his sense of taste. Ike would not shut up about Israeli politics, either, a precarious yamaka clipped to the back of his head. Kyle stabbed his scalloped potatoes with his fork until he could not stomach it and stood up.

"Shut up! Do we  _live_  in Israel? No? Then why the  _fuck_  do you care!" Kyle was shaking, gripping the edge of the table with all he had, the words spilling out of him like something vile his body needed to expel.

"Kyle, it's important because I'm  _Jewish_ —"

"Shut! Up!" Kyle raised his head suddenly and fiercely, like a wolf about to howl, his teeth barred in a way that supported this image.

His parents were frozen, potatoes falling off of his mother's fork, his father's mouth agape.

Finally, Kyle roared, "You weren't even born Jewish! I'm more Jewish than you!" and stormed away from the dinner table.

He continued to shake, his whole body racked, when he got back to his room. His parents didn't let him have a lock on the door, so he took his desk chair and jammed it under the doorknob to prevent them from coming in. They didn't bother him; they knew he didn't pose a threat to his own health. This thought made Kyle tangle his fingers in his hair. He wanted to scream, to destroy, as if he could right what had gone wrong by tearing every shred of evidence that anything had happened at all to pieces.

In the end, after this second whirlwind of emotion had passed, Kyle dropped into bed and slept in the same clothes he had been in throughout the whole ordeal. They smelled like the hospital.

Nobody at school knew what had happened to Stan the next day, which was both unusual and not. Stan had a spotty attendance record, but this  _was_  a small town where news travelled fast. Somehow, the collective quiet of the people made Kyle realize the utter gravity of the situation, weight he felt like he had to shoulder all by himself, and overall school felt like struggling up a mountaintop with a boulder between his shoulders. Pockets of beautiful ignorance came in his lessons. He threw himself into them with all that he had, asking the teachers poignant questions that left them dumbstruck and taking the best goddamn notes of his life.

The history teacher was understanding about Kyle's essay. That stung most of all.

When he got home, his mother fed him news of Stan: "They moved him into a private room. When his situation stabilizes, they're going to take him—"'

Kyle cut her off, his keys still in his hand and his messenger bag falling to the floor. "Can I see him?"

"Of course."

So Kyle walked right back out the door, which he had not even shut yet, and once again drove to the hospital. He wished he had more time between his house and hospital, but it was such a small goddamn town, he didn't even make it through three songs before pulling back in that parking lot. He sat in the car for a while, the urgency that had gripped him evaporating off his skin as if it were sweat. He punched the steering wheel to see if anything would happen; the horn blared through the empty parking lot.

He asked another nurse that looked identical to the rest where Stan was when he forced himself to walk into the hospital instead of smoldering in the parking lot. Walking there, Kyle realized that he hated hospitals a lot. When he was younger, his diabetes finicky and uncontrolled because of the general carelessness of his youth, he had spent a lot of time in that place. Kyle had almost died there. And now there he was, embarking on this journey to visit the love of his life on what could've been his deathbed.

A small blessing, Sharon was the only one in Stan's room this time, Randy at work. This room was larger, the second bed unoccupied, a window with an open curtain showcasing an almost picturesque view of mountains in the distance. As a sign of the intended longevity of his stay, Kyle took a seat.

"Hey, Kyle." Sharon was on the bed again; Stan was sleeping this time for real. A muted television played advertisements on the wall. "Did Sheila tell you the news?

"Yeah. How long will it be until they transfer him?" Kyle winced. The phrasing made Stan sound like an invalid, like he had no choice in the course of his life.

"Tomorrow, if everything goes well." Sharon smiled; it was the saddest smile Kyle had ever seen in his life. "They say that the place they're sending him will really be able to help him, more than the local therapists and pills he's on right now."

"Obviously," Kyle said, before he stopped himself, "since he used those pills  _to_   _try to kill himself_." He dug his nails into his palms.

"Kyle," Sharon said, his name sounding like a shell of what it had once been in her voice. She opened her mouth as if to speak again but did not.

A few minutes passed. Kyle looked at Stan's face. He had a dark shadow of a beard on his jaw like a man, though Kyle knew that it was the product of failing to shave in—what, weeks? Months? Kyle had lost count. He hated the feeling of the hair on his face, or what it had made him feel inside, rubbed and raw, and a vivid image of pushing Stan away when he had tried to kiss him last week because he couldn't stomach that stubble hit him, and—was that it? Was that the straw that broke the camel's back? No, he told himself, repeating things he'd read online; it wasn't his fault, it was the disease's fault, and if Stan had perceived that as an offense it was warped due to the illness that dominated his mind—

Kyle jumped, almost out of his seat, when he heard Stan groan.

"Kyle?" Stan moaned, his eyes not even open.

"Yes, Kyle," Sharon said, before Kyle could process the situation and formulate a response. "He's here, finally, baby." To Kyle himself, she said: "He's been asking for you."

"Sorry, dude." A word as light and soft as a brushing of fingertips against skin, which is what Kyle wanted to do, though he was too chickenshit to move to see Stan more closely. God, he hated hospitals, and he hated seeing sick people in hospitals. "I had school."

Stan made a sound; to Kyle, it was like hearing somebody laugh from miles underwater. Kyle tried not to cry. "It's okay." Stan's voice drifted off. Sharon gave Kyle an apology with her expression. Then, like punctuation, Stan whispered "Dude." and fell back asleep.

Kyle hated hospitals. Kyle hated seeing a sick person in a hospital. More than all, Kyle hated how  _useless_  he was inside of a hospital. He sat in that hospital room for hours that Friday, watching day become night then become day, in silence with Sharon, staring at Stan. This was something that Kyle would always remember, this eighteen hours that felt like all eighteen years he'd lived to that day, wasting away in this hospital and unable to do anything. He couldn't leave; he couldn't cure Stan; all he could do, in the end, was press a kiss to his forehead when the doctors dismissed Kyle so that Stan could be transferred to the psychiatric hospital two hours away.

Shelley came home from school that weekend and wanted to see Kyle, of all people, that Sunday. They met at the Marsh's house, which in hindsight was not a good decision. It already felt like the home of somebody whose child had died. Before, when it felt like the home of ghosts stuck waiting for salvation, it had been much more manageable. Kyle was overcome when he walked through the unlocked door, having to pause and grasp the doorframe, because there was no need for security in South Park, hadn't been a real murder in decades, and people never bothered with locking doors.

All the lights were off except for the one in the kitchen (Randy had been going through some thing about electric companies), so Kyle headed there.

Shelley was standing against a counter. She looked different than the last time Kyle had seen her—she'd shaved half her head and had a nose ring. She favored Sharon where Stan favored Randy, and sometimes when Kyle looked at the both of them, he felt like he was seeing a bizzaro universe version of their parents. But Stan was not there now, he was instead withering away in a hospital bed, and Kyle cut his thoughts short when Shelley gave him a nod and said, "Hey."

"Hello," Kyle said, cordial.

"I wanted to talk about Stan," Shelley said. Her lisp was gone, having disappeared with the braces, and she spoke curtly. "Find out why he tried to kill himself."

"It's not a mystery. He has depression." Kyle crossed his arms and shifted his weight to his hip.

"Well, yeah, but  _why_? Why  _now_?" Shelley lifted herself off from the counter, tipping her weight forward.

"Why would I know?"

"Because. I wanted to talk to you because Stan always talked about you. He made it sound like you were the light of his life."

"I wish he wouldn't do that." Kyle struggled with this quality of Stan. On one level, he appreciated the worship like he was sure anybody would; there was no doubt something romantic about being told that you were the only reason somebody was living, that you were the only good thing in a shit world. On most every other level, Kyle recognized that this was beyond unhealthy and hindering Stan in ways that, while not irreparable, furthered preexisting problems. All in all, Kyle found saying this to be true; he did wish Stan wouldn't do that. He wished Stan hadn't tried to kill himself, too.

"Well, whatever you wished, he did." And then, like she read his mind: "And he tried to kill himself. So, like,  _why_?"

"I told you. I don't know why." Kyle dug his nails into his arms. He had forgotten how— _abrasive_  Shelley could be. Their personalities were not mixing well, a spark to each other's powder keg, both volatile, angry and confused. They glowered at each other, Kyle realizing they were about the same height, and then Kyle turned on his heels and walked away.

Sunshine hit him like a bullet when he exited the Marsh house.

Long, long stretches of days where he could not go to the hospital and visit Stan, and every weekend when he could make the drive, the lack of progress dampened his spirits. The doctors told him that Stan was progressing, but it was so slow the difference would not be noticeable for a while. The doctors gave him sympathy; Kyle gave them sarcasm and snarls.

As for Stan himself, well—the first time Kyle visit, he put on a smile and pretended like everything was great. Kyle was overcome with the urge to hit him for this, which scared Kyle, and the visit was cut short when they both burst into tears. The next time, the doctors turned him away and said they thought Kyle might not be the best thing for Stan to have in his life at that moment. Kyle had made a scene.

The third time, Kyle took a seat in the plastic chair at a plastic table across from Stan and focused in on his wrists. They were thin. They looked like they would squeak if rubbed together, crossed on the table like that. Like they were in handcuffs. Kyle threaded his fingers through his hair and directed his gaze towards Stan's eyes instead, which were a watery blue that Stan himself seemed to be swimming in.

"Dude," Kyle said. It was pleading. It was begging. It was  _groveling_. It was all the things Kyle did not do.

Stan deflated in front of him, and in that movement Kyle saw Sharon, in the line of his shoulders and the way Stan shook as if jostled by a gentle breeze. To the table he said: "I'm getting better, Kyle. I swear I am. I swear on my life."

On his life? His life wasn't worth  _shit_  to him. If it was, he wouldn't be  _here_. He wouldn't have left Kyle all alone to fend off gossip at school, or to boil inside of his bedroom, or to garner sympathy from stupid small-town faces with cud-chewing looks in their eyes. Kyle opened his mouth to say that, but remembering what had happened last time he made a scene there, shut it. They spent the rest of their forty-five minutes together tracing patterns on each other's hands; Kyle traced  _please, please, please_ over and over again, and could tell that Stan did not get the message by the way he focused on some point beyond Kyle.

After that, visits evolved into talking, slowly. Kyle learned to avoid topics such as school, their relationship, Stan's family, old friends, the future. Instead, they talked a lot about their childhood, swapping memories, reminding each other of things. It itched at Kyle, a future-oriented person, and walking into this hospital always felt like time travel. But sometimes, when they stumbled upon a good memory together, Stan's eyes would light up and it was all worth it. The nurses learned Kyle's name; they gave him gifts and their faces weren't as small-town, cud-chewing and stupid, even if they did look like every other nurse in the world. Stan told Kyle about his fellow patients, feeding Kyle stories about their eccentric behavior, and Kyle understood the implicit  _I may be bad, but at least I'm not_ that _bad._

Kyle had been forced to, for the first time in forever, stop thinking of him and Stan as a conjoined unit. They revolved around different suns for the time that Stan was inside the hospital. Kyle went to school and worked towards graduation; Stan worked towards becoming a functional human being again. One in the future; one in the past; and though with anybody else it would have pained him so, Kyle yielded whenever he went to visit Stan.

Stan was released two months after he'd been admitted. Graduation had come and gone. He had enough credits to get his diploma once he took some exams and secured his final semester grades, but that was the last thing on his mind, Kyle figured. He'd nag him about it anyway, and about whether Stan would go to college, and everything else that Kyle could nag him about to forget the fact that Stan had a new prescription twice as strong as the last one and would now be the one making the long drive to the hospital every weekend for a checkup. But he would do that later. For now, they would celebrate.

"I don't want to have sex," was the first thing Stan said to Kyle when Kyle came over to see him. They were in Stan's room, Stan already in bed under the covers. Kyle stripped down and got in beside him anyway.

"That's okay." There had been a hope—of course there'd been a hope. That Wednesday before Stan had tried to kill himself had been the last time they'd had sex, a slow affair in the back of Kyle's car. Kyle had been on Stan's lap, rocking, Stan's fingers like feathers on his hips. And Kyle had cried, over and over _, come for me, come for me, Stan, just come_. It was a memory that burned inside of Kyle, that he tried not to think about.

"It's just the pills," the Stan of now was saying. "I feel hollow." He was mumbling nonsense into Kyle's bare shoulder. Kyle stroked his hair in response.

They were both naked, cold, smooth, their legs rubbing together. Kyle's body responded, but it was nonsexual to him on all other levels. They held each other, Kyle gripping onto Stan's back with all that he had, Stan's touch as light as it had been the last time they had sex. It was easy not to talk. It was easy to slip into sleep.

No matter how ineffectual, sometimes Kyle wants to grab Stan by the shoulders and shake him. Scream at him: "Don't you remember how good things used to be? Don't you realize things could be like that again?" It had seemed so possible when they talked of the past when Stan was in the hospital, that those memories fueled his recovery. But then Kyle would remember what Shelley had said,  _he talked about you like you were the light of his life_ , and resisted. There was nothing Kyle could do, nothing, nothing, not now, not ever, and that afternoon, in bed with Stan, this is what Kyle dreamed of:

Stan and Kyle, seven, maybe eight years old. Children. Innocent. Untouched. Laughter, and a lot of it. Sunny summer days. Hands in hair. The frosting on store-bought cupcakes. Their mothers watching and gossiping from the shore in baggy 90's shorts and too-large sunglasses. Tiny bathing suits around small waists as they walked into a swampy Stark's Lake hand-in-hand because, though both too proud to admit it, they were a little scared.


End file.
